concert in Seoul

My roommate, Brittany, has a friend who studied at her university for a year and now lives at home in Seoul. Brittany went to visit her friend the night before leaving for the mud festival, and friend's mom told Brittany that she had just been given two free tickets to a concert at the Seoul Arts Center for the following tuesday and would like to give them to her and a friend. So she invited me, and I jumped at the chance and had a WONDERFUL time.

I was super excited about the trip, both for the chance to see a great performance and for something to do with my roommate. Brittany was born in Korea and adopted by an American family as a baby. I think her family lives in Minnesota, and she goes to school at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Clair. She and I get along reasonably well, but we have nothing at all in common. At all. So it was good to have a chance to do something together; she's invited me a couple of times to go shopping and clubbing with her and her crew, but that's just not me, so I leapt a bit to find a place to socialize that fit me better. It really didn't fit her usual comfort zone very well, but away we went. Neither she nor her friend in Seoul had any idea what the concert actually was--she had some vague idea that it might have something to do with some opera or choir thing--so we went in a bit blind, but it went fine.

We took a bus to Seoul and Brittany's friend picked us up and walked us home, where her mom drove the three of us to supper and to the concert. The picture is of the four of us at dinner, clockwise: me, Brittany, Yi Rang (the friend), and Yi Rang's mom. We had this wonderful steamed pork that you wrap up in lettuce with various hot things. I can tell I am getting used to the food here because my nose has quit watering when I eat spicy things; it shot up my sinuses really badly for a while. At this meal, Yi Rang's mother even commented that I ate a lot of kimchee. I was very proud of this from a native. I decided one day that if I was going to be in Korea, I was going to like kimchee, and it's been going splendidly ever since. (I've also been doing reasonably well with chopsticks in the last week. I tried asking for help from at least thirty different people for the first three weeks, and got at least thirty different answers that I just couldn't handle. Then this Dutch guy Peter reckoned that I wouldn't be able to eat noodles with them at one meal last weekend, and that got me stubborn, so I just picked the things up any old way and ate those noodles with them to show him I could too do it. And that too has gone well since. The moral of that story: if ever you visit an Asian country, don't ask for help on your chopsticks. Just use the silly things. Ahem.) This picture is also a good one of the eating-sitting-on-the-floor phenomenon here. Lots of restaurants are not this way, but plenty are. You take off your shoes and leave them at the door, and walk barefoot on a nice smooth floor to a table maybe a foot and change above the floor. There are small mats you sit on, and if you wore a dress because you're going to a concert, you sit sideways for the whole meal. I thought that was going to really kill my back, but after we started eating, I forgot about it and was fine.

The concert turned out to be a men's choir formed of all the top male opera stars in the country, and it was fantastic. There was also a really wonderful piano trio of young women that did two ensemble pieces and whose strings played with the choir on a couple of pieces. Yi Rang and Brittany were a little apprehensive about having to sit through opera, but there was very little opera on the program. Neither of them had ever seen non-pop music performed before, so this was a great first experience with it for them, since everything was high-quality and mostly very accessible non-opera. I tried to tell them helpful and interesting things through it, too, hoping that it would help them relate to the performance, and I think it did. They teased me a little bit, saying they felt like they had a dictionary along, but I think they appreciated the input. Yi Rang even asked some good questions about things, and they both perked up and looked like they understood more when I pointed out that the "stein song" on the program probably referred to a beer stein.

Leave me a comment if you've got more questions. It's now saturday morning, I just woke up a little while ago, and I am weary of typing further on this story. Boo for not sleeping enough.